Madness of the Sun
by DezoPenguin
Summary: The things Chikane did were horrific. In nearly every way she could think of, she tried to make Himeko despise her. So why did Himeko barely pause to blink in the face of it?


We lie together, the soft blue light of the remade Earth playing across our bodies. She is asleep in my arms, curled like a child against my chest. She fought so hard, so relentlessly to achieve something that she didn't really want and which, in the end, I would not allow her to have.

She couldn't believe me when I said that I loved her. Time and again she'd turned it aside to keep to her plan, her desire to make me hate her. As if that was possible.

I was sure some part of her did not believe even now. Now that I'd chosen to refuse rebirth and join her in this shrine until Ame no Murakumo called to us again. Her guilt was too strong. Guilt over killing me, condemning me to imprisonment her during our past lives. Guilt, too, for holding feelings for me that were decidedly not pure. And then, guilt for the sins she committed as an Orochi, guilt for the things she'd done to me in the course of her terrible plan to make me despise her.

"How can you?" she'd whimpered to me after we made love the first time. "How can you love me after what I've done?" When I didn't answer at once she began the litany, "Killed you, manipulated you, hurt you, destroyed everything you cared for, raped you—"

I silenced her then with a kiss, and let my hands go to work on her again. It was effortless to arouse her, distract her from her thoughts. Her passion for me had been pent up for years—perhaps lifetimes—and as mine for her had as well it was no chore for me.

"You did those things for me," I murmured against her heated flesh. "You did them to save me from pain in the future. How could I hate you for that?"

Which was entirely true, of course, but not the entire truth. She accepted it, though, because even the Lunar Priestess finds it hard to explore conversational subtleties when celebrating a passion she'd craved for so long, a joy she could scarcely believe was real. And it wasn't like she expected any kind of deception from me. I was generally awful at it, after all. My face usually gives it away in an instant.

Not this time, though. I wouldn't allow it.

Yes, it was true that I forgave her what she'd done because I recognized why she had done it. That she was trying to save me from the unending cycle of death and rebirth, reunion and separation, to give me happiness at the cost of her own damnation. It wasn't her fault that she didn't realize I loved her as much as she did me, or that I couldn't be happy in a world without her. So of course I forgave her. It was _easy_. That was completely true.

But there was another truth.

She'd done to me the most awful things she could think of. She'd wanted me to think she was a monster. She'd wanted me to hate her enough to kill her, then wish her out of existence forever. I'd told her why it was that I forgave her.

I hadn't told her how I'd been able to.

Why I had continued to search for her truth.

Why it was the things she'd done to me had had no effect. How I'd shrugged off being betrayed, being _raped_, with a casual ease that no doubt bewildered her, would bewilder anyone. Why what she thought was one of the most awful things she could do to a person made me, what? Mildly nervous that I'd made her mad at me and a little embarrassed over my lost virginity?

She should have asked then, but she couldn't—she could hardly have revealed what she was trying to do, and she probably wouldn't have been able to notice. She'd had a hard time accepting that I wasn't willing to play the role she'd scripted for me in her drama. And I couldn't have answered her anyway, not then. Not until the doors of the Lunar Shrine had closed behind us.

I hadn't remembered our past lives as well as she had. For her, the memory was clear and crystal-edged, as bright as those from last week. For me, it was something cloudy, like the ghosts of a dream. That was one of the reasons why, when I chose the new world, I'd prayed for part of it to be that, if we were reborn into it eventually, we'd both keep our memories of this just-completed life. What we'd found was too precious a thing to risk losing.

Once we were within the Shrine, though, another ghost had surfaced—a memory not of a previous life, but of a time like now, outside of life. I hadn't remembered it when I _was_ alive, of course. A memory of "past lives" was one thing, but "past deaths"? Hardly that.

Now I remembered, though. The walls of this shrine. The scent of the wood rising like on a spring morning.

In prisons, the worst prisoners, the ones who are a persistent danger to others or to the authorities, are placed into solitary confinement. They were sealed away, denied all human contact but for their jailor, who would arrive at regular intervals for delivering meals.

A dead soul requires no meals.

A deal soul requires no jailor.

In a prison, even in solitary confinement, a prisoner knows that, beyond her walls, lie people, others like herself. Through her window come the sounds of humanity. The moans of fellow sufferers, or even the promise of greater freedom when seeing the general population in the prison yard.

Beyond the walls of the Lunar Shrine there was nothing, just the endless, barren rock of the moon.

A prisoner serves a sentence, a term of years. Perhaps it can be measured, ticked off with chalk marks on the walls—ten years, fifteen, twenty. Or perhaps it is for life, but life is just that, finite, for all of us coming one day to an end, and for a prisoner it would likely be a shorter span than for a person outside.

Here, I would wait for an indefinite time. A day, a year, a decade, a century, a millennium—however long it would take for humanity's malice to accumulate, to corrupt the world and call to Yamata no Orochi. Then and only then would I be released. I would never know when. If it would be that day that the doors opened. That day that it would end. That day my hope wouldn't be snatched away.

And beneath it, the fear that the end would _never_ come. That she had chosen the world _without_ rebirth, and that I would be here, forever alone, until time itself ceased to be.

How many times had I endured it? A hell that wasn't fire or pain or torment, but the sheer, endless isolation of it all.

I smiled softly, my lips against the back of her head, feeling the softness of her hair against my mouth.

She'd thought she could hurt me.

She'd thought violating my body could make me see her as a fiend.

How could she know that there'd been centuries on end when I would have prayed for such a violation, just to know that there was someone _there_, more, that there was something about _me_ that could utterly command their attention in some way, _any_ way.

And I could never tell her.

Her guilt was so strong, so terrifying for the things she'd done to me, the parts of it she understood. What would it cost her to know the fullness of it?

But she would never know. It was a secret for me to bear alone.

That was all right, though.

Her madness was that for my sake, she would do literally _anything_. Commit any sin, break any commandment.

But my madness was every bit as great.

For _her_ sake, there was nothing I could not endure.


End file.
